Album Notes

Cobblestone, one of Portland's longest-running traditional Celtic bands, evokes images of rain-soaked Irish streets with horse-drawn carriages. At least that's what is on the cover of their CD "Unpaved Celtic", minus the horse-drawn carriage. The ban's unique and sometimes haunting sound derives from the combination of traditional and contemporary instruments blended together around the tunes and songs from the British Isles.
The band, founded somewhere around 1983, features hammered dulcimer played by Vicki Clark, and Northumbrian smallpipes, whistles and (in dire emergencies) the Highland pipes played by Gail Gibbard. Doug Hamar's baritone voice is complimented by his driving rythms on guitar and banjos. Last but not least, multi-instrumentalist Charlie Hyman adds vocals, fiddle, mandolin and guitar to the mix. All in all, this particular selection of instrumentation is ideally suited for contemporary and traditional arrangements of Celtic music, each instrument enhancing the others.
"Unpaved Celtic" is Cobbleston's second album and covers a wide variety of Irish, Scottish, Northumbrian and original music. Doug's original humourous songs, "Main Squeeze" and "Danny Boy", are always crowd-pleasers, but he can also write trditional style songs as in "Twelve Pound Canon". Several of the instumental tunes are published here for the first time. The album is a balanced combination of our favorite tunes and songs, and has something for everyone.